


Nothing

by busaikko



Series: Even the Moon [1]
Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Buddhism, M/M, POV First Person, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-07-10
Updated: 2005-07-10
Packaged: 2017-10-09 17:13:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/89749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/busaikko/pseuds/busaikko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remus Lupin contemplates Sunyata (nothingness, emptiness), and Severus Snape finds a house and eats oranges.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nothing

**Author's Note:**

> Translation of the Heart of Prajnaparamita (Perfection of Wisdom) Sutra by George Boeree.

Body is nothing more than emptiness,  
emptiness is nothing more than body.  
The body is exactly empty,  
and emptiness is exactly body.

Isn't there supposed to be something Zen about having nothing? Isn't nothingness supposed to set you free from worldly desires, lift you above human pettiness and bring about the thunderclap of satori?

  


Maybe. Don't ask me--I know fuck-all about philosophy these days.

  


Mostly what I feel about having nothing is bitter. So I guess I lied about having nothing: I've got a great bloody chip on my shoulder and too damn much pride. Oh, and incurable lycanthropy.

  


What don't I have?

  


I've no pictures. None of my father or mother, none of me as a baby or a gap-toothed child, none of my friends at school. Which is a pity, because both the family and friends are dead. When I had a driver's license I had a crap one of me, my hair standing up and deer-in-the-headlights look on my face. But that went in the bin long ago. The man in that picture also no longer exists.

  


I've no clothes of my own. I don't go around starkers, that would be off-putting, but rummage through my wardrobe and you'll find nametapes sewn in most everything. It wasn't as if Regulus would ever open his old school trunk for a vest again, would he? Mr Black didn't leave many things that I fancied, except for the lovely tailored woolen trousers I took over. I don't want to look Byronic, with falls of lace all over. Zen simplicity, remember? Oddly enough, the shirts I wear mostly belonged to the Missus, and my appropriation makes her portrait claw the frame, which gives me keen pleasure. It's not as if anyone actually looks at button plackets, anyway.

  


Another possession: I guess my sense of humour is still intact.

  


What else don't I have?

  


I've no clobber. If only I could figure out a way to explain this that was palatable, I'm sure I could write an American bestseller. But most of the clobber that I owned was left behind when I fled in the night, or destroyed (twice along with my dwelling at the time), or sold for cash. The gifts given me over the years--and there was a time when my friends were generous with their gifts, and I was generous with my acceptance--are all gone. My schoolbooks long since resold, all the notes I took burned. Nothing remains to tie me down to the past.

  


I do have a toothbrush. I occasionally have a comb. Both of these are concessions to necessity because I have no home to call my own and no resources to fall back on if I lose my job. I like my job. I sit in my assigned cubicle for five hours a day. I have no paperwork to do--all data goes directly into the computer. I conduct all customer interaction over the telephone--I never have to see faces. I avoid my co-workers and they me: I have not discouraged the rumour that my monthly absences are visits to my parole officer. An almost perfect bubble of isolation, and I get paid for it. I consider myself lucky.

  


I have a lover. This doesn't bother me as much as it might, because we agreed from the start that neither of us would ever possess the other. When we are alone and the relevant clothing removed or pushed out of the way, we speak only of sex. Sex is our easiest communication, our only concession to emotion. We have had rage sex, grief sex, despair sex, fear sex, relief sex, pain sex. We have had sex slowly in the mornings, desperately in stolen minutes behind hasty spells, violent bloody sex in dark and dangerous places, and screaming animal orgasms in every room of this house.

  


Only in sex are there no barriers between us. I am sure that even free of all calendar-sense he could tell the phase of the moon by my performance in bed: the wolf does like to assert itself. With him I don't need to hide what I am. Nor does he hide from me. I have seen him come while still maintaining the defenses of Occlumency; it is only a pale shadow of the pleasure he can feel when he lets his mind go. It doesn't bother me to feel his thoughts with mine as we approach orgasm; it apparently doesn't bother him to have the wolf in his mind then, either.

  


When we are together as -- friends? colleagues?-- there is no smoldering heat and no sexual tension, just a comforting level of hostility. I dislike being pitied and coddled, which seems to be the best I can hope for usually. I loathe being understood by people who _don't_\--or worse, who say they want to understand. Understand what? How it feels to send children to their deaths? It was war, and nothing more. He does not talk with me about the war.

  


With Severus I have no past by tacit agreement: we have been tangled together in irredeemable and unforgivable acts against each other for nearly thirty years, after all. Were we to open that can of worms, surely everything would fall apart. We speak of today most often; on occasion even mention tomorrow. With each other, we need no apologies.

  


This is enough for me. If we talked about it, which we do not, perhaps he would say that it is no longer enough for him. I suppose now that he and I are survivors, no longer soldiers fighting for a common cause, we must find a new common ground to meet on or give up the effort entirely. I find the sex unchanged; but I am bothered recently by the nagging feeling that I am being courted, that there is something contrived in our irregular meetings. He teaches still; I answer telephones; we have sex; the sun rises and sets; the moon waxes and wanes. All changes; everything is interconnected. Nothing stays the same.

  


* * *

  


So, in emptiness, there is no body,  
no feeling, no thought,  
no will, no consciousness.  
There are no eyes, no ears,  
no nose, no tongue,  
no body, no mind.  
There is no seeing, no hearing,  
no smelling, no tasting,  
no touching, no imagining.  
There is nothing seen, nor heard,  
nor smelled, nor tasted,  
nor touched, nor imagined.

Part 1

  


"I thought the Weasleys were having you over for dinner," he said, pausing for a moment in the library door before letting himself in.

  


"I have discovered the joys of solitude."

  


"Ah." He traced a finger along the books piled on the desk, and blew away the fat roll of dust that appeared. "I'd always thought you were more of a social type. What do you think about, in your solitude?"

  


"I contemplate nothingness."

  


He took up an armful of books and moved along the bookcase, shelving them silently. All the hours of research for the war effort had made the haphazard piles nearly invisible to me. Watching him methodically unravel the work and destroy the evidence of my diligence, I wondered what he had done with his medals. Did they hang, perhaps, over the mantelpiece, or did he set hot drinks on them to keep from scarring the tables? Once, he had wanted that heavy, tangible proof of his worthiness; the war had burned away his sense of deservedness, perhaps. Perhaps he had not even gone to collect his medals from the Minister. Perhaps he had just moved on.

  


"You _dwell_ on nothingness, Lupin. You nurture it. You build walls out of it." He reached up to replace a book on the topmost shelf. "I'm not sure you quite understand the concept."

  


"Are you offering me spiritual advice, Severus? Because I find that highly amusing, I'll have you know."

  


"When you attain perfect wisdom, you can explain it to me," he said dismissively. He finished the rest of the books in silence. I watched him work in silence. He was graceful in movement and in stillness, every move deliberate.

  


He was like that in bed as well, not choreographed but preternaturally aware of both his body and mine. He was capable of stopping in the middle of a mad passionate fuck, stopping utterly still, and then delivering the one single touch capable of driving me over the edge. On more than one occasion I had come merely from listening to him describe what he would do to me in exquisite detail.

  


Now he looked at me, lazy on the sofa and watching him work. "What are you trying to achieve?"

  


"It's Zen," I said,"I'm working on satori."

  


"Is that why you wear girl's blouses?"

  


"I don't."

  


Severus smirked. "Some of us do check the button plackets, you imbecile."

  


That was quite possibly the funniest thing I'd heard in days, or weeks or years, and I had to sit down from laughing too hard. This made Severus look deeply suspicious.

  


"It's OK, Severus, the joke's on me, you can laugh too if you want."

  


"Fool," he said, and left the room.

  


* * *

Part 2

  


He raised himself on his arms above me with a curiously dispassionate look. Before I understood what he was doing his hand slapped me hard across the cheek, my head snapping to the side as if coming unhinged. It was enough to undo me. I came, crying, and I was still crying when he finished fucking me and dropped down heavily at my side.

  


If I am incapable of love, then he is incapable of comfort. His hand rested on my stomach, tapping in a strange counterpoint to my sobs until I had myself under control.

  


"What will you do when you succeed in making me stop loving you?" he asked finally.

  


I rolled against him, finding my own comfort in the heat of his body. "What will you do if you succeed in making me love you?"

  


I felt the tremor go through him. One tremor, just that once. Self-control to rival mine.

  


"Please don't tell me I should have been beating you all along." Was that disgust or sorrow in his voice? Still, it made me laugh.

  


"It was... it was like getting whacked with that stick, in Zen meditation. Putting me back in the here-and-now."

  


"Yes, but your nose is bleeding."

  


I flicked out my tongue, tasting salt and iron, tears, sweat, and blood.

  


* * *

  


The Bodhisattvas rely on the Perfection of Wisdom,  
and so with no delusions,  
they feel no fear

Being near him is like being near a black hole: I can feel the pull of his need as soon as he enters the room. Today he has brought me a paper sack of perfect mandarins, and we eat them in bed, leaving juice stains on the sheets. He likes to talk after sex. I think that he hopes this gives him the advantage of bringing me down to his level. I do not think this is true. I enjoy the oranges so long as they remain merely fruit. Gifts I have learned to distrust.

  


He is sitting cross-legged on the ruined sheets, the oranges spilled out in front of him. He offers me another; they are almost all gone. We have been greedy.

  


"I want to get a house," he says abruptly. "You should live with me."

  


I can't help smirking at him. "Merlin--you're Severus Snape, scourge of Hogwarts students and cold-blooded Order veteran. You're not getting romantic on me, are you?"

  


"Obviously not." His eyes on me are black like the bottoms of wells. "I still need a housemate, or I won't be able to afford the house. And I like the house."

  


"And I'm your first choice, am I?"

  


"You don't annoy me as much as most people." He pauses, and then adds honestly, "usually." The rest of the time, I suspect I annoy him far more than ordinary people ever could, when I frustrate him into walking out in speechless, incoherent rage.

  


"If we were housemates, would we still fuck?"

  


The gleam in his eyes flickers, as much hurt as he will reveal to me. Or perhaps more, perhaps he doesn't realize I can see it.

  


"We could fuck. Or not. I'll only charge you for rent." He pauses. "One of the upstairs rooms has barred windows and a reinforced door."

  


He would not dare create such a thing for me; that would be courting rejection. I tried to imagine him in the estate agent's office, a pillar of threatening darkness demanding to see all the properties with cells. That he found one with a room upstairs and not a cellar, dungeon, or cavern was impressive. "Werewolf in the family?"

  


His eyes narrow at me. "Mad wife, I believe."

  


"You're not having fantasies of chaining me up when it's not the full moon, are you, Severus?"

  


"Always." He can say it now and smile in his evil way, after sex and still in bed, when it might be a joke. He would never say it outside of this intimacy, when it might be true. Well, whether you want it or not, Severus, you'll never see me in chains. I've had enough of that for one lifetime.

  


I toss the last mandarin up and catch it, counting ten times. "What is this, Severus?" I ask, balancing it on my palm.

  


"It's an orange," he retorts, taking it and peeling the thin skin off in one piece effortlessly. He twists his thumb, and the orange divides into two perfect halves. He offers me one gravely.

  


I take it from him. "When are we moving in?"

  


"Sometime after we eat the orange." He always eats his section by section, biting the inside membrane first and then taking the whole section into his mouth to press the juice out with his tongue.

  


"I'm crap at this, you know," I say.

  


"I know." He lay back, one knee raised, naked with his eyes closed. He won't say it doesn't bother him, he won't say that his love is enough for both of us, he doesn't lie to me. "You don't have to be good at everything you do."

  


I stretch out next to him. "I'm sorry."

  


He shifts, just enough to feed me the last section of orange. "Don't be daft, Lupin." There are so many things that could go wrong, I want to say, so many reasons we shouldn't try and make more than what we have. I have nothing. I _want_ to have nothing, I want to feel nothing, I want to owe no one anything, I want not to want so badly. He kisses me and it stops the slide of my thoughts, anchors me in my skin, on the bed here, in the warmth of his now. He pulls back and looks at me.

  


"What?"

  


His pause is deliberate, weighted with caution. "We need more oranges," he says finally.

  


I roll over him, pin him down, press my body into his. "I imagine we do," I say.

  


Bright sunlight spills in from the window.

  


The air smells of citrus, the sheets are sticky with it, his skin tastes of it, especially his fingers.

  


And I am light inside, suddenly, swiftly, aware throughout my body; fear banished, trusting that I will not fall; and all is perfect for a moment.

  


He is watching me, and I think how different he looks when the wariness is gone. "What was that?"

  


I smile and wonder if he felt that moment of joy pass through me. "Nothing," I say,"That was nothing."

  


And what we have after is hope sex, light sex, trust sex, satori sex.

  


* * *

  


Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate. Bodhi! Svaha!  
(Gone, gone, gone over, gone fully over. Awakened! So be it!)


End file.
